She had in her room a few volumes of the principal poets of the end of the eighteenth century, and of the Empire, such as Delille and Fontanes; but their high-sounding and material poetry was not suited to us. She had been lulled by the melodious murmur of the waves of the tropic, and her soul contained treasures of love, imagination, and melancholy, which all the voices of the air and waters could not have expressed. She would sometimes attempt with me to read these books, on the strength of their reputation, but would throw them down again impatiently; they gave no sound beneath her touch, like those broken chords which remain voiceless when we strike the keys. The music of her heart was in mine, but I could never give it forth to the world; and the verses she was one day to inspire were destined to sound only on her grave. She never knew before she died whom she had loved. In her eyes I was her brother, and it would have mattered little to her that I had been a poet for the rest of the world. Her love saw nothing in me but myself. Only once I involuntarily betrayed before her the poor gift of poetry that I possessed, and which she neither suspected nor desired in me. My friend Louis--had come to stay a few days with us. The evening had been spent till midnight in reading, in confidential talk, in musing, in sadness, and in smiles. We wondered to see three young lives, which a short time before were unknown to each other, now united and identified beneath the same roof, at the same fireside, with the same murmur of autumnal winds around, in a cottage of the mountains of Savoy; we strove to foresee by what sport of Providence, or Chance, the stormy winds of life might scatter or reunite us once more. These distant vistas of the horizon of our future lives had saddened us, and we remained silent round the little tea-table on which we were leaning. At last Louis, who was a poet, felt a mournful inspiration rising in his heart, and wished to write it down. She gave him paper and a pencil, and he leaned on the marble chimney-piece and wrote a few stanzas, plaintive and tearful as the funeral strophes of Gilbert. He resembled Gilbert, and he might have written those lines of his, which will live as long as the lamentations of Job, in the language of men: Au banquet de la vie, infortuné convive, J'apparus un jour et je meurs; Je meurs, et sur ma tombe, où lentement j'arrive, Nul ne viendra verser des pleurs! Louis's verses had affected me; I took the pencil from him, and, withdrawing for an instant to the end of the room, I wrote in my turn the following verses, which will die with me unknown to all; they were the first verses that sprung from my heart, and not from my imagination. I read them out without daring to raise my eyes to her, to whom they were addressed. They ran thus-- * * * * * but, no! I efface them! My love was all my genius, and they have departed together.